Ars Electronica 2025 – Panic/Yes/No

We are visiting Ars Electronica Festival 2025 in Linz. Here a post with impressions, buzzwords, associations of mine. More about me and inspiration than about Ars. Attending is highly recommended.

This post will evolve.

Robot dogs, aggressive, chained, threatening. Awesome. I feel the threat of Chinese robot dogs with guns now physically, as that one Black Mirror episode did to my brain:

Dynamics of a Dog on a Leash
Takayuki Todo (JP)

Finely crafted ring of hundreds of ventilators in black 3d printed vents forming a smoke ring circle. Craftmanship! The looks!

Liminal Ring, Jin Lee

Nice talk with  Stefan Schartlmüller from https://www.ig-demokratie.at about Democracy Cafes. Find the right Questions using systemic consensus, then work on answers.

Stefan Schartlmüller and Leobard

Every artsy fartsy description text reads like it was generated to please the curators, inventing something theoretically appealing sounding, after the work was completed. I imagine many of the works were done because some idea was cool or the material or the aesthetics, something completely different than what they must write on the shiny plaque. They should do “no bullshit, why I really  did it” versions, too. Or we should add fake plaques.

Exhibit A

An artsy fartsy plaque busting bullshit buzzwords that surely please a curator and the theory fraction. What I found especially unpleasing is that it is “interactive” by placing one person with one keyboard in control of the whole room, degrading everyone else to puppets. But this feat of “dictator interaction” I found in multiple pieces. Everyone should play, simultaneously.

… and this art piece detail has an aesthetic that reminds me of a monochrom.at fanzine that fell into a toilet while reading and got wet and wobbly, multiple pieces of several pages forming a collage:

… More to come